University of Colorado athletic officials announced Monday that Folsom Field, the 50,183-capacity home of Buffaloes football, is open for live music for the first time since a 2001 concert by the Dave Matthews Band, which was fined $15,000 for playing past curfew.

First up on Folsom's revived music calendar is a pair of shows by Dead & Company, a band that features three of the four surviving members of the Grateful Dead plus John Mayer, on July 2 and 3.

While the stadium hosted the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles and more throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, concerts there largely ended following a notoriously noisy Van Halen show in 1986.

Come July, Dead & Company will be only the fourth band to have played Folsom Field in the intervening 30 years.

Lance Carl, CU's associate athletic director, said Folsom has "a long, storied history with concerts," and live music makes good business sense for the facility, which recently underwent a $160 million renovation.

"The perfect non-gameday event for me is a concert," Carl said.

The Dead & Company concerts will be the sole shows at Folsom in 2016, and Carl expects only two concerts to be scheduled in 2017.

"We want to take this slow," he said. "This is something we want to be long-lasting."

A Grateful tradition

The Grateful Dead is said to have first played in Boulder at another CU venue, the Glenn Miller Ballroom, on April 13, 1969. But the band made trips to Folsom in 1972 and 1980, when it played a pair of 15th anniversary shows.

This year's Dead & Company concerts were arranged through promoter Don Strasburg, vice president and senior talent buyer at AEG Live Rocky Mountains.

CU officials "reached out to us a while ago about any opportunity for events that would be a good fit for Folsom Field," Strasburg said Monday.

The promoter had the proposal on his mind when Dead & Company came to Broomfield's 1stBank Center in November, and a band manager threw out the idea of the group playing Folsom, Strasburg said.

He saw a match.

"As a promoter, our job is to look for the right fit for the right situation, and Folsom, in the world of stadiums, is a more organic type of experience," he said, adding that the facility, built in 1924, with its vintage architecture, is the kind of venue that appeals to the Deadhead community.

Also, he said, "It's generally what we call a lower-bowl experience, so for the most part, you don't have seats that are 20 miles away."

Strasburg hasn't talked with members of Dead & Company, but he suspects they're all for the idea of returning to Folsom.

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones play Folsom Field at the University of Colorado in 1978. Monday, CU officials announced the first concerts in 15 years at the Buffs' stadium: a pair of July shows by Dead & Company, featuring three surviving members of the Grateful Dead. See more historic Folsom Field concert photos at dailycamera.com. (Daily Camera file photo)

"I presume they loved it since they decided to do it," Strasburg said. "This idea did percolate from one of the band's managers, so the spark was started by them."

Community outreach

Noise and traffic concerns contributed to Folsom going quiet for so long, and university officials were careful to get out in front of community objections.

"It was really important to us to look at all the impacts that would happen, not just to the neighbors but the larger city," Boulder campus spokesman Ryan Huff said. "We want this to be as minimal an impact on the neighborhood as possible."

For concert days, the university plans to promote cycling and other alternative transportation modes, use gameday-like traffic control measures and work with concert promoters to reduce neighborhood impacts, Huff said.

Neighbors might even be offered reduced ticket prices, he added.

Concerts are expected to have a positive economic impact on the community.

Huff noted that the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates that out-of-town visitors who stay in local hotels spend about $210 a day, and visitors who make day trips from elsewhere in the region spend about $85 a day. Spending on concerts will benefit CU itself.

"It's obviously a chance for the athletic department to make revenue on the stadium other than just on football games," Huff said.

The window for concerts at the outdoor venue will last only about two months, from early June to early August, when the field will be allowed to recover for football season.

The venue's capacity for concerts is expected to be about 42,000.

The record for largest-ever crowd at CU's stadium was set May 1, 1977, when 61,500 people came out for the Folsom Music Festival, with Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, John Sebastian and hometown band Firefall on the bill.

The Grateful Dead, with Phish's Trey Anastasio filling in for the late Jerry Garcia, performed a series of farewell concerts in Santa Clara, Calif., and Chicago last summer to mark the band's 50th anniversary.

After that, singer-guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann regrouped as Dead & Company, without bassist Phil Lesh, and toured the country with Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti filling out the lineup.

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